A density.
I close the fridge and turn around, and Oz is standing exactly where I left him, perfectly still in the way he goes still when he’s offering space for something, his surface lit from within by slow, rolling waves of gold so saturated they throw faint light onto the kitchen cabinets.
“You don’t haveto,” he says.
“We’re going outside, Oz.”
He straightens at the seriousness in my tone, then, a moment later, softens.
“Okay. I’d like that.”
Chapter 12
Tomorrow Night Too
Maisie
Oz and I work throughthe day. Fourteen more batches of rosemary-oat. I weigh and label and pack while he stirs.
We eat Mrs. Pritchett’s casserole standing at the studio counter between batches seven and eight, me with a fork and himwith one tendril submerged in a bowl of it, slowly dissolving the contents for nutrients.
Then it’s back to work.
By nine o’clock, the studio is full of curing racks and the count on my whiteboard tells me I’m more than halfway done with fulfilling the Verdance order. My hands smell like rosemary and lye and the faint mineral coolness that Oz leaves on everything he touches.
I scrub up at the utility sink, dry my arms on a clean towel, and look out the window.
Full dark.
The ridge is a black cutout against a sky prickling with stars. No lights moving on the road.
Gary’s house, barely visible around the curve, is dark except for the blue flicker of a television. Mrs. Pritchett’s place shows one warm square of kitchen light, which means she’s in for the night with Harold and his reflux.
“Okay,” I say to Oz. “Come on.”
I lead him to the back door, the one that opens onto the scrubby half-acre behind the house where I keep meaning to put a garden and never do. The screen door squeaks when I push it open, and I hold it with my hip while Oz flows through behind me.
He stops on the concrete step, and I watch him from three feet away, arms crossed over my chest.
The air is cool and dry and carries the sharp green smell of creosote, which only smells like that after dark when the resins release, and underneath it, the dusty mineral note of cooling rock.
Oz’s entire surface goes still.
Every color drains to a pale, luminous silver, like someone wiped a screen clean.
Then, slowly, pigment bleeds back in. Teal from the ground up. Violet rolling across his shoulders. Gold sparking in scattered constellations across his chest and arms, appearing and vanishing like fireflies trapped under glass.
He lifts his face towardthe sky.
He has no eyes in the way that I have eyes, no pupils to dilate, but the flat plane of his face reshapes itself into something concave, cupped toward the stars like a satellite dish, and I understand that he is looking with his whole body.
“Oh,” he says.
The word vibrates through his form. I feel it in my sternum from three feet away.
He steps off the concrete and onto the bare ground, and something happens to his feet. They spread. Flatten and widen, thinning until I can see the dirt through him, and then sink, his edges seeping into the soil like water finding the path of least resistance.
His whole body shivers, a single full-length tremor that moves from the earth contact upward.
